Please join the Law Women's Caucus in welcoming the next speaker in its Women in Academia series, Professor Alison LaCroix. Professor LaCroix's first book, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism, examined the history of federalism as an idea from the colonial era through the founding.  Her new book project focuses on the decades between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Civil War, a formative but overlooked period when constitutional arguments about commerce, slavery, and the nature of the Union dominated public debate. The years between 1815 and 1861 witnessed the rise of a new form of popular constitutionalism, the growth of the American state, and a crisis of some of the founding era’s central compromises.